Of course, your motorized desk is just contributing to global warming. You should have gotten one that uses a hand crank.

Actually, I think that desk is very cool. I sit for most of the day, but not for more than 10 minutes at a time. I'm a fidgeter and tend to walk over to colleagues offices rather than using email or phone.

If the strenuous life is so all fired good for your health how come the longest lived sector of the population is the wealthiest sector? With rare exceptions the ladies who lunch and their male equivalents outlast the harried general population by 5 - 10 years. Why? Because they lead relaxed lives. The issue isn't sedentary, it is relaxed sedentary versus harried sedentary.

I had always heard about sitting all day making food go to fat around the middle. As we walk less and less these days, we need to start standing when staring into digital devices, or just go outside and walk a golf course in search of golf ball size white balls.

Will you buy me one of those? My current "desk" is a hollow-core interior door with plumbing pipes for legs; they're screwed into pipe flanges which are attached to the bottom of the door. It was good enough while it lasted, but it's falling apart.

"If the strenuous life is so all fired good for your health how come the longest lived sector of the population is the wealthiest sector?"

Aside from the point you raise that the wealthy don't have to work like dogs to keep themselves alive, the wealthy also have the money to pay for the latest and greatest and best from among the full panoply of health services and doctors available. Working stiffs and others paying exorbitantly for insufficient health insurance (or who have none) are fucked when they get sick.

Aside from the point you raise that the wealthy don't have to work like dogs to keep themselves alive, the wealthy also have the money to pay for the latest and greatest and best from among the full panoply of health services and doctors available. Working stiffs and others paying exorbitantly for insufficient health insurance (or who have none) are fucked when they get sick.

"Will you buy me one of those? My current "desk" is a hollow-core interior door with plumbing pipes for legs; they're screwed into pipe flanges which are attached to the bottom of the door. It was good enough while it lasted, but it's falling apart."

My father made a table exactly like that for me and my sister in the 1950s. It was great to have all that space to spread out drawing materials and things on. My maternal grandfather worked for a newspaper (The Ann Arbor News) and he would send us packages of paper, so we also always had plenty of paper.

At the very least, get one of those large exercise balls to sit on while you are in sit-down mode. Keeping balanced all the time you are sitting will cause you to use extra muscles, especially your core muscles, I think.

From the rear in the still-frame view Althouse looks *so* much like Swedish pop diva Robyn!

So is this why Ann was standing so flirtily in the last Pinkerton bloggingheads? I noted that and thought it most fetching, but I wondered if it was just a whim of AAs-- in spring a young woman's fancy turns to blogging on Weiners or something?

We had several of those in our deli/smoked foods processing area. Great for cleaning fish, chicken and meat and other processing because the can be easily disenfected, as Palladian says.

As a desk. Not so much.

Now that I am at home working instead of at an office, I cook something while computing. That way I have to watch the time so I don't get lost in internet land, get up from the desk go up the stairs, walk around and stand in the kitchen. Washing and folding laundry also keeps me from becoming a vegetable.

Palladian, contact the New York State prison industries. Maybe they'll make you a really big license plate with legs. If they will, and it comes in a large cardboard box, get a long knife and stab it a few times. Just in case.

Also.... My father, now in his 80's, has spent a lifetime of sitting. First as a printer operating a linotype machine, later teletype and lastly computers. After retirement, he became an author of travel books which also required a lot of sitting.

The doctor recently diagnosed him with some pretty serious leg/circulation issues from all of the long term sitting.

The prescription: get a dog.

You have to walk a dog several times a day (or else you have serious carpet issues). Now they walk at about a half mile or more 3 times a day down to the ocean and along the beach and have the joy of owning a wonderfully cute, 3 year old, loving dog that they adopted from an elderly woman who was going into long term care.

Working stiffs and others paying exorbitantly for insufficient health insurance (or who have none) are fucked when they get sick.

Actually, after 40 years as a doctor, I have concluded that the worst medical care is that provided to the rich, then comes the poor. Too many rich people order their doctors around and indulge in weirdo alternative medicine.

One example; Eleanor Roosevelt died of miliary tuberculosis while being treated for leukemia. The miliary form is widespread and often causes very high white counts.

Richard Nixon had an operation done for his deep vein phlebitis that is in no textbook. The surgeon, I think I know him, tied off his iliac vein, guaranteed to cause a lifelong swollen leg. My partner and I were afraid we were going to get him in our hospital, just up the road from San Clemente, and heaved a sigh of relief when he went to the political doctors in Long Beach.

Boingboing's been exploring this for months now, and has some good posts on DIY alternatives to the very expensive, motorized adjustible desks on the market. Unfortunately, since the topic unfolded over time, they failed to tag the posts well. Go over to boingboing.net and just search the site for "standing desk" and you'll find some great examples.

One thing many people who've changed over seem to agree on: get a good gel mat, the best you can afford.

We'll be converting to these in our house over the next few months. I'd be interested from hearing from Althouse how it's worked out after a few weeks pass.

Rumsfeld has used a standup desk since the Navy. I took my copy of his book to the Reagan Library for him to sign. They had this beautiful desk for him and then had to run around to find an elevated table for him to use to sign. It was a cheap cocktail table.

"That's got nothing to do with its healthfulness(?), just whether you want to make the effort."

The things that you actually do are the only things that will have an effect. The trick is to get things that cause you to do something good, not things you won't use that might do good if you used them. It's like buying vegetables that sit in the crisper until they rot. You're better off buying a bottle of V8 if you actually drink the V8.

I like that treadmill desk a lot! I also saw a show a few months ago in which a man had built a pedal system (with resistance, to make it more beneficial) under his desk. He could pedal the entire time he was working at his computer, and he averaged about 10 miles a day that way.

A treadmill like that might be nice some of the time, but it's so big and clunky that it would end up stuck there all the time, and it wouldn't be cool. It would look bad, feel bad, and probably have a noise and a funny smell. Also, it would totally be in the way when I want to lower the desk and sit on a chair.

I'd need something small that could be easily moved out of the way. I've seen a compact elliptical machine, but I question whether it would work well enough.

The attorney I work for has a motorized desk and a stool that when you sit on it reminds me of one of those big exercise balls that some use at their desks. Only the stool is so much more comfy, no back, jiggly, adjustable and stable. Sometimes, depending on the height of his desk, I feel like I'm approaching the bench to drop something in his in-basket. I'm rather short, he's tall and he sometimes has his desk adjusted to my chin height while he stands. Seriously, I may ask for a motorized desk for my Christmas bonus because of the adjustable comfort.

Not what I said. A number of surveys have been done over the years. They show that people believe that smoking is three time as dangerous as it actually is. Propaganda! All of those smoking related deaths? Most of those folks drank water all their lives too.